Hey, thanks for asking about that. As a matter of fact I did publish my first novel this year: Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a kind of mash-up of the domestic drama, the historical novel (focusing on the student rebellions in May ’68 in Paris and also, indirectly, on the Holocaust), and the noir detective story. Laird Hunt said of it that “The push-pull between stunning language and inventive narrative is pure pleasure,” and the critic Daniel Green writes that the novel’s characters “live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page.” It’s available from Spuyten Duyvil Press and SPD and Amazon and it makes an interesting companion piece to The Barons, which is what we’re really here to talk about.

In the time of ever more rapid diffusion and dispersal of truly humanistic termini
The time of collective seizure of rapidly diminishing carbon cores
The time of the barons in their towers growing fatter unto death hooked up to
dizzying interconnected internet spirals of IVs sucking everybody’s placenta dry
Aka your milkshake aka my humps
In the time of dominoes laid from one end of the asylum to the other
The time of male whores who can’t catch a break
Time of the underground economies trading hot licks for rapid desertification
Time of distant thunder
Time of the perpetual el niño
Time of rain filling the abandoned moviehouse and everything picturesque and
prepared for the ancestors
Ancestor-life the only scale that matters now the scale of the illegible the illiterate the unread
Not just a hitler but many come-hitlers in the twilight bathrooms of the barons,
making their dicks look small
Being now of sound mind and sound body I, thirty-nine years of age brimming with half-spent undessicated nougat-rich mortality
Say unto thee children, Burn the motherfucker down